warning perhaps. But Ryan refused to look at his dad now. He was staring fixedly at Cooper as if clinging to something he had finally managed to grasp.
‘He knocked Fran about a lot/ said Ryan. ‘She never said anything, but some of us knew about it. We could tell when we went round there. The door is never locked, and sometimes we’d go in when she wasn’t expecting us. We worked it out all right.’
‘Did Fran ever make a complaint?’
‘No.’
I’m going to have to talk to her. When is Cully due back?’
Then Lucas interrupted. ‘We don’t know,’ he said.
‘Can you give me a phone number where I can contact him? Or tell me what company he’s working for?’
‘To be honest, he’s left,’ said Lucas.
‘For good?’
‘We hope so. We don’t know how to get in touch with him.’
Cooper looked at Ryan. The boy’s stare was so fixed that his eyes were becoming glassy, and he was pale with some painful internal effort.
‘It was Craig who used to get most upset about it,’ said Ryan. ‘He used to get really, really angry.’
Lucas took a couple of steps forward and stood over his son. There were veins standing out on his neck, and his fists were clenched.
‘We don’t -‘ he began. But whatever he was going to say seemed to stick in his throat when he saw the boy’s expression. It was fear. But not a fear of his father.
Ryan looked past Lucas at Cooper, like a trapped animal seeking the smallest escape route.
‘Craig got really angry,’ he repeated desperately.
‘But Craig is dead/ said Cooper. ‘I can’t ask him about it.’
There was a message here that Cooper knew he wasn’t picking up. His brain felt really slow, as if his thoughts had been blunted by the days of frustration and lack of communication.
The Oxleys were watching him almost pityingly, in the way they might watch a dumb animal trying to figure out what was happening as it blundered blindly from its pen to be slaughtered.
438
The old man had a particularly disturbing stare. It had begun to feel like something physical, a sensation on Cooper’s skin, as if a spider had landed on him and was crawling across his neck. Cooper wondered what was going on in the old man’s mind that made his thoughts so uncomfortable.
Then Cooper realized there was an important question he should be asking. But nobody here had been cautioned, and he couldn’t invite them to incriminate themselves.
Tell me something about Barry Cully/ he said, looking now at Lucas.
‘What do you want to know?’
Tor a start/ said Cooper, ‘does he have a finger missing on his left hand?’
‘Hold on, what’s happening now?’ said the South Yorkshire inspector, pacing the yard at Shepley Head Lodge.
‘He’s coming out, sir.’
‘Everybody move back/
‘He doesn’t seem to be armed/
Thank God/
Michael Dearden walked across the yard with his hands in the air and tears running down his face. His wife appeared in the doorway behind him, shielding her eyes against the glare of the lights.
Four officers moved quickly in on Dearden from different directions, shouting instructions at him. Within a few seconds, he was handcuffed and had been searched for weapons. One of the officers gave a thumbs-up sign.
‘It’s all over/ said the inspector with undisguised relief.
But it didn’t feel over to Fry. There was a smell in the air that was too strong to be the lingering reek of a discharged shotgun. It was a smell that carried a meaning and presence as powerfully as the scent of Rive Gauche from Emma Renshaw’s car. She turned away from the house and swung her binoculars upwards.
‘Smoke/ she said.
‘What? Not another damn moorland fire!’ said the inspector. ‘If you ask me, those kids from Manchester should be shot and roasted over the flames/
‘No/ said Fry. This smoke isn’t coming from the moors. It’s coming from Withens/
439
40
Ben Cooper had asked to use the loo, when he heard Marion Oxley begin to shout. He’d really wanted to take a look upstairs, where he found a door had been knocked through the wall from number 1 into number 2, providing access to the bedrooms in both houses without having to go outside and back in again. He thought this was probably one of the unauthorized structural alterations that J. P. Venables had complained about.
He had also been looking for a chance to use his mobile phone without the Oxleys overhearing. Under cover of the noise of the toilet flushing and water running into the hand basin, he called Diane Fry.
‘Ben,’ she said, ‘I was just to going to call you. I’m on my way down to Waterloo Terrace. You might want to get there as soon as you can.’
‘Er, Diane, that’s where I am already.’
